


Piano

by darkling2222



Category: Hetalia - Fandom
Genre: Angst, OC, Piano
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-02
Updated: 2013-08-02
Packaged: 2017-12-22 05:14:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/909341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkling2222/pseuds/darkling2222
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's very painful to be a ghost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Piano

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [the blog the-gakuen-ghost](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/25536) by Jackie. 



Black, white, black, white, 82 keys and infinite combinations. Crystal tears falling: the sound of sobbing drowned out by the pretty plinking of the piano. Long slender fingers, pale from too much time in dim music rooms, dance nimbly across the keys. Her shoulders shake violently but the sounds of the liquid beauty are faultless. It spills from her body and pools around her feet, melodies swimming fish like around the room. The sound of exquisitely delicate sadness pulls the ectoplasm from his loneliness. The spindly specter is drawn to the beauty of her music but entranced in her sorrow.

He can remember deep in murky memories; the same pain, the same raw grief that ate at her now had long before consumed him completely. And Arthur understands. Her expression is emotionless, only the fast falling tears and hiccupping gasps of air betray her. Arthur glides closer, soaking in the sound of her resounding anguish. For a moment he listens, trying to memorize the loveliness because he never gets very much. Loveliness in any form for him is always fast and fleeting. But her sobs get louder, overtaking the blessed sound that can’t compete in volume, but he can’t stand the dry, gasping sobs.

He wants to take her hand and ask her what’s wrong and make it better. She’s just a child, like him, probably barely past fifteen. He can’t remember anyone holding his hand when he cried but it surely feels as nice as the music does. Probably better.

Arthur wants her to keep playing, but not let the beauty be drowned by ugly sorrow. He wants her to smile and talk about mundane things to her friends like homework and boys were all that mattered. That’s all she should have to worry about.

He wants this more than the world.

And he tries, so hard, to help her. A hundred times he tries to hold her hand, wipe away her tears, mimic the movement of her fingers on the keys, tell her that it’s okay anything, anything to make her end her wretched weeping.

But she never hears anything, not even when he rages violently against her, screaming and yelling in her ear.

She never feels anything, not even when he hit her as hard as he can, overcome with frustration at his own helplessness. Her only reaction is steady tears and graceful hands. He is invisible to her in pale grey.

Arthur can feel hot tears of anger prick at the back of his eyes. It was only muscle memory, he couldn’t feel anything except the occasionally flutter of emotion. Nothing in the world of the living could touch him and death no longer bared its fangs where he dwelled, dancing the same steps over and over in limbo between the two. In a mix of white life and dark death that blended to a monotone grey. She still sobs, inconsolable.

He sighs. It is always the same, every time, no matter how hard Arthur tries, and he always tries so hard to help. The boy clad in ill-fitting clothes and a ragged haircut hid from bullies in a bathroom stall. The girl with a heavy back brace who no one spoke to except to giggle behind her back. 

The boy with green eyes that are ringed with dark bruises like wicked shadows, green eyes that pooled with pitiful tears when he realized he had no one, no one at all. Green eyes that quivered shut as the shivering pistol muzzle leaned against his skull, before the bullet bit hard into soft brain and everything turned a static grey.

Wait, those are his memories.

He has nearly forgotten. It had been such a long time since he had had green eyes. People had always commented on how bright they were, how unique. But death has covered them with filmy grey cobwebs that envelop the color. All color had been leeched out of him except for sorrowful grey. So devoid of all emotion or life, to him it was more hideous than anything else because it was nothingness. Death was nothing but nothingness.

She, however, is beautifully alive. There is always beauty in life, even the most disfigured life is a thousand times more beautiful than the most picturesque death.

But for Arthur it was a bitter beauty, impossible to enjoy through all consuming envy. She's alive and able, while he rots alone.

Like her music and her sadness, she herself is exquisitely delicate. Petite with hollow bird bones that broke easily. She looks like an old photograph, all stark shades of ebony and ivory like the keys on the piano. The only thing that broke from her refined juxtaposed appearance are the deep scarlet blotches on her cheeks and rimming her eyes and pale pink chapped lips slightly open to let the sobs escape. Her hair is long and black, thick as night and twice as dark. It is not well cared for, broken at the tips, somewhere between straight and wavy accented with tangled curls and sharing about the same texture as a Brillo pad. She wears it down circling her shoulders, and the loose strands stick to her tears but she is too absorbed in the music to push them away. Her skin, is only a shade darker than her starch stiffened white blouse and light blue veins, adorned like henna peek out from beneath her bony wrists. Her shirt is part of their shared uniform that even since the years he had attended had changed very little, the only difference is her red tartan skirt covering willowy legs encased in simple black stockings. Her slim fingers continue to dance, each step producing another ringing melody.

The school’s piano is a rickety piece of junk and is the same rickety piece of junk that has always been there for as long as Arthur could remember. Every year a few more scuffs and a few more nicks, too stubborn for the common decency to do everyone a favor and break irreparably. The piano is several notes out of key, the sound echoing inside the old instrument like a belch before it finally spits out the song. But she is very good, gifted even.

He stands at her side, listening to her music and the small gasping breaths that make her shoulders quiver so piteously. Arthur puts a hand on her shoulder but, like always, it’s as if neither of them were there. He sighs; he wants to help so badly and can never seem to learn that nothing will change no matter how many time’s he’s told himself the truth of the matter.

He will always be in a state of nonbeing and the memory of having once been something continues to slip away. His former life had blurred to a few emotions and a few moments that occasionally mix incoherently with the lives he had observed. He sighs again when he considers that in fifty years he won’t be able to remember whether she had played the piano or he had. It frightens him to think that someday he wouldn’t know if he had ever had green eyes. Or even what his name was after long enough. He focuses back on her, not wanting to think of this anymore.

He just wished it was over, it didn’t hurt being nothing. It didn’t hurt to be grey. It hurt to think that once he had had color, it hurt to know that the vibrant, colorful, beautiful memories of sweet life are slowly being stripped away by time. Nothing was sweeter than life, but at the same time he couldn’t stand the thought of his own life. Every happy memory he had was enveloped with bitterness because he had ended it by his own hand. He had done it. Arthur hadn’t had the wonder wrenched away, he gave it away and that was the worst bitterness. He had given it all up for this grey. Arthur can’t stand to think that anyone else would dare make that trade. Arthur wishes he could forget but his last moments still cling like a bad smell in his clothes. He would even give up every memory of color to get rid of the all-consuming regret.

Suffocating sadness and frustration fill up the room from them both, shot through with silver threads of music. He didn’t even know this girls name, but he still tries. Her tears terrify him with the memories they unearth within him and the idea, no matter how irrational, of this girl or anyone else being forced by their own hand into the grey was the worst thing he could imagine. He hovers behind her protectively, helplessly wanting and hopelessly wishing that he could fix whatever was broken in her as the music swirls around them.


End file.
